unfoldment

Unfoldment (term coined by Joseph Cornell(1903-1972)) "precious moments of grace" "...het ogenblik waarop een voorval z'n hardheid verliest zich ontvouwt en dan iets prijs geeft dat anders in een strakke plooi verborgen zou zijn gebeleven..." (the moment at which something loses its hardness and unfolds revealing something which would otherwise have remained hidden in a tight fold - my tr. jgk) also to be included are references to coincidence synchronicity random order chaos accident nabokov speaks of poets' love of coincidences and this is an idea borrowed from the surrealists In terms of unfoldment and its relationships with the audience, I am interested in the idea that the level of the audience’s engagement with the work determines which levels of the work are revealed. I have employed this extensively in the medium of the internet particularly in the way that the i.j.oog site is housed on a French server and has a French front end. It might be minimal but unless the English speaking viewer scrolls to the bottom of the page to the version anglais link he or she will never see the oog site proper. For the French speaker it is quite a different experience however since the translation was done by a computer - babelfish - and although it looks authentic and is intelligible the computer’s mediation means that it is a long way from the writer’s intentions - the long term aim is to have the whole oog site accessible only through the mirrored in computer translated French. The idea of interrupting the accessibility is taken further within (the English version of) the site where a number of the stories are available from the menu - but other stories and all of the poems are available only through links from within the other texts..